The Cthulhu Encryption Read Online Free PDF Page B

of Dee’s own manuscripts, including the originals of his navigational manuals, and the only known copy of one of his own collections of cryptograms, the so-called Claves Demonicae . A copy of its counterpart, the Claves Angelicae , survived, although it is probably a reconstruction, and very likely defective. I have seen a copy of the copy, and have studied the cryptograms it contains, which are in the same seven-by-seven format as the one I have here, but use markedly different symbols, probably devised by Dee or Kelley, and are opaque as to their meaning.”
    He had not given the piece of paper that Chapelain had shown him back to the mesmerist, and now seemed inclined to hang on to it, but he raised it indicatively as he spoke the final sentence. Chapelain peered at it again, in a bleary-eyed fashion implying that he could no longer bring it properly into focus.
    Trying to connect up the pieces of the puzzle, I said: “So you think that the cryptogram in Levasseur’s possession, which he threw into the crowd when he was hanged, might have come from one of Dee’s books, which ended up in Goa via Lisbon, after being stolen from London? And you think that the cryptogram tattooed on Chapelain’s dying whore might be the same one?”
    “As to those matters, I still have a scrupulously open mind,” Dupin said, in his usual infuriating manner, “but with regard to the question of whether there might be some connection, I am certainly prepared to take an interest—enough interest, at least, to make it worth my while to visit Bicêtre first thing in the morning, if that can be arranged.”
    “But I still don’t see what connection there can possibly be between my patient and Olivier Levasseur,” Chapelain objected, wearily.
    “Nor can I,” said Dupin, “but Levasseur was caught and hanged. John Taylor was never found. Captain Johnson wrote his book too soon to make any comment on his eventual fate, but other sources report, vaguely, that he settled in India. If that is true, he must have had help. If his friends belonged to the East India Company—which seems the likeliest possibility—they surely demanded a large tribute in gold and diamonds in return for their help, and certainly had the institutional means to redistribute such produce without attraction undue attention. At any rate, there was no evidential trace of him for a long time, and so far as I know, no one has the slightest idea of the circumstances in which he lived or died—but now, unless I am linking the information you have gleaned about your patient to Père France’s enquiry in an overly fanciful manner, there is a provincial bibliophile who possesses some indication that the name Taylor assumed when it become impolitic to be John Taylor any longer, might have been….”
    “Leonys,” I put in swiftly, eager to claim what little credit I could for deductive acumen. “Hence the bibliotaph’s speculative linkage of the two names.”
    “Exactly,” Dupin confirmed.
    “You think my patient might be this John Taylor’s descendant, four or five generations removed?” Chapelain queried. “Or do you think she might have acquired the name by marriage to one of the pirate’s descendants?
    “I am in no position to judge, as yet—but the possibility seems to be worth investigating.”
    “A pity, in either case,” Chapelain went on, “that it’s the wrong pirate—the one who never came to France—although I suppose that they might both have had a copy of the cryptogram, and might each have tried to preserve it in his own way. If she had the key to a fortune in gold and gems inscribed on her back, though, she’d hardly have ended up as a streetwalker in the gutters of Paris. It’s all too tenuous, in any case—probably the merest of coincidences.”
    “But you said before that she might not even have known that the inscription was there,” I reminded him, “and if she had, she surely would not have had the key to the cipher.”
    “As